Strata Blog

We’re in the midst of putting together video tutorials that cover each of Strata’s main features.  I figure I’d leak some of these ahead of time on this blog, as many may find them useful.

This first video is sort of a basic “rules of the road” for getting around the Strata interface.  It’s a little over 3 minutes long and covers things like using tabs, panels, various views, and controls in the table view like moving columns and editing.

If you’re an expert Strata user, you’ve probably already got these bases covered.  However,  there’s a good shot that many people will probably pick up at least one thing new.

More rogue tutorial videos to be posted soon…

We had a really good question come up in our forums regarding Strata’s ability to replace values within cells.

Bottom line, if you have a value in one field and want to auto-replace it with a different value, you can easily do this using the Update Records tool (Data > Update Records…).  In a nutshell, it works like this:

1. Choose the field you want to update.
2. Choose the new value you want to update with.
3. Create the logic to let Strata know when to update a cell and when not to update a cell.

Both #2 and #3 enable you to get pretty complex, since you can use formulas in both of these areas.  The “update with” (#2) area can be particularly tricky, since it gives you the ability to transform values on the fly.

However, it had been a while since I’d personally gone through the various options one can use to replace records, but as I did, I quickly realized our documentation wasn’t comprehensive enough.

So, I added the “replace” rules to the post here.

Hope this helps.  Now, if I only could figure out a way to replace Friday with Saturday… :)  Hope everyone has a good weekend!

P.S.  Got a question about Strata that you’ve been curious about?  Please post a note on the support forums and we’ll be happy to help!

It’s been almost one year since we released the beta version of Kirix Strata to the public.  During that beta cycle, we provided several videos and screencasts via our blog to emphasize different things the software could do.

Thankfully, even though the videos show the beta version in action, almost all of the content is extremely relevant for the final version of Strata as well.  The only variance really has to do with the user interface; we ended up moving around icons and toolbars and menu items quite a bit until we got something that seemed to work best.  Oh, and you may see the original Strata logo that we threw together for the beta.

So, maybe you can consider this blog post your Tivo or on-demand video page for “Season 1″ of Kirix Strata.  Here are the five links, with details and highlights of each one below:

• Access and Manipulate Data from the Web
• Identify Embedded Search Terms within Apache Web Logs
• Manipulate Call Center Data and Create a Mapping Visualization
• Features Overview:  Data Bookmarks, Quick Find & Quick Filter and Report Writer
• Combine Table from MySQL Database and HTML Table from the Web, then Create a Report

(more…)

We’re just warming up the Strata blog right now, but we going to be adding various tips and tricks on how to use the software more effectively.  One aspect of this will be to discuss general support questions we receive that have relevance to many users.

So, along those lines, we received a question the other day about concatenating fields together into a single string.  Excel has a CONCATENATE function that will let you take two non-numeric columns and place them together.  Here’s an example from the Excel help manual:

CONCATENATE("Total ", "Value") equals "Total Value"

Strata makes this even easier, since no function is required to concatenate or join strings together.  You simply need to add them together:

"Total " + "Value"  equals "Total Value"

So, say you had a table with a first name field (”firstname”) and a last name field (”lastname”) and wanted to put these together.  You would insert a new calculated field and enter the following formula:

firstname + lastname

So, if a record had “John” in the firstname field and “Smith” in the lastname field, you would get a result of:

JohnSmith

The spacing is obviously problematic here, so we just need to add in a space for formatting purposes:

firstname + " " + lastname

which would result in:

John Smith

So, to sum up, no concatenate function is necessary when using Strata… just add your strings together.